On Monday, the White House walked back deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes’ impolitic, contemptuous quotes in theNew York Times Magazineabout the foreign policy establishment (“The Blob”) and the Washington media (“27-year-olds” who “literally know nothing”). Press secretary Josh Earnest said he’s confident Rhodes “would say it differently if he had the chance.”

Actually, Rhodes did have the chance, when I interviewed him at length in March for a Politico Magazinestory about President Obama’s communications problems. He was a bit less impolitic, but just as contemptuous. His main thesis was that Obama has struggled to communicate about global affairs because elites and reporters cling to outdated bumper-sticker ideas about American power, ignoring the lessons of the disastrous Iraq War. “There hasn’t been a reckoning with the magnitude of that error,” he told me. His main theme, a bit ironic in light of his self-aggrandizing comments to Times writer David Samuels, was the importance of humility in foreign policy, especially regarding the geopolitical Augean Stable that is the Middle East.

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“The default view in Washington is that if there’s a challenge in the Middle East, the U.S. has to solve it,” Rhodes said in our interview. “Our basic point has been, no, sorry, we learned the opposite lesson from Iraq. It’s not that more U.S. military engagement will stabilize the Middle East. It’s that we can’t do this.”

The furor over the weird Rhodes profile is inside-Beltway-baseball, but his foreign policy ideas are truly important. That’s because, as Samuels reports, Rhodes has a true mind meld with Obama, which is why he’s so influential in the White House despite his remarkably thin foreign policy credentials. Uproars over presidential aides are generally about the president rather than the aide; what Rhodes thinks wouldn’t matter if he didn’t think the way Obama thinks. Writers who know way more than I do about foreign policy believe Samuels twisted the facts to make Rhodes sound like Obama’s Svengali—and to make the selling of Obama’s Iran deal, which Samuels opposes, sound perfidious—but Rhodes clearly shares Obama’s outlook. His beliefs reflect the Obama Doctrine.

Samuels seemed less interested in the substance of that doctrine than in the notion that Rhodes is a talented dilettante, an aspiring fiction writer who thinks he’s living a Don DeLillo novel. He portrays Rhodes as a modern-day Henry Kissinger who provides similarly bloodless Realpolitik advice, the only purported difference being that Rhodes reflexively schemes to keep America out of foreign wars instead of reflexively scheming to get America into foreign wars. But that’s a big difference! And while it may have been ideologically convenient for Samuels to portray Rhodes as a brilliant salesman who snookered America, Slate’s Fred Kaplan noted that “if Rhodes is as powerful and skillful and clever as this article claims, the question should have been asked: Why does Obama’s foreign policy have such a lousy reputation?”

That was the question I kept asking Rhodes for my communications story; his title, after all, is deputy national security adviser for strategic communications. And his consistent answer was that Obama’s interpreters—foreign policy elites and D.C. journalists—promote unwise ideas about America’s role in the world, especially in the Middle East. It’s been 18 years since I was a 27-year-old reporter, and I’m not a literal know-nothing about foreign policy, but I’m no expert, so Rhodes gave me a kind of Obama Doctrine for Dummies that was notably missing from the Times Magazine opus. Obama recently gave a more nuanced explication of his worldview to Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic—a great reporter who was slandered in the Samuels piece as a shill—but Rhodes gave me the Cliff Notes version, with three major points that show where the White House is coming from.

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The Middle East is an intractable mess that U.S. power cannot fix. Samuels suggested the White House has overlearned the lessons of Iraq, but Rhodes believes Washington has underlearned the lessons of Iraq. And the key lesson is that instability in that region is a fact to accept, not a challenge to overcome. The situations in Syria or Yemen or Iraq itself may be awful, but it’s folly to expect a muscular U.S. intervention to make those situations not-awful, even though Washington inevitably judges the president according to the messes on his watch.

“The fundamental problem in the public debate,” Rhodes said, “is the presumption we can fix these places and impose satisfying outcomes.”

For example, Rhodes said, it’s true there have been terror attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan now that fewer than 15,000 American troops are stationed there, and they routinely inspire calls for renewed U.S. engagement. But there were also terror attacks when 150,000 American troops were stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Similarly, Obama came under intense pressure to take out Syrian President Bashar Assad, who used chemical weapons even after Obama called that an unacceptable “red line,” but Rhodes argued that U.S. diplomatic pressure ultimately got Assad to give up his chemical weapons, while military action could have been self-defeating.

“If we had taken out Assad, what happens the next day?” Rhodes asked. “We just fought a war in Iraq for a decade. We know how that turns out. People say the president is creating a straw man with that comparison, but Syria is right next door, with a similar sectarian division and even less resources. It’s not a straw man.”

The obvious question, if Obama is so skeptical of grand solutions and military interventions in the Middle East, is why he helped oust dictators in Egypt and Libya. To my surprise, Rhodes suggested the White House now regrets its meddling, which ultimately helped pave the way for a military coup in Egypt and chaos in Libya. In retrospect, he thinks the administration should have been less optimistic about the Arab Spring, and more realistic about its own ability to shape an inherently turbulent region with deep religious schisms and few democratic traditions.

“Look, those actions did not succeed the way we hoped,” Rhodes said. “Again, it demonstrates the limits of America’s capability to dictate events in the Middle East. That’s not always a satisfying narrative in Washington, but it’s reality.”

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The Middle East mess distracts the U.S. from problems it actually can fix. Rhodes told me that when Obama took office, “foreign policy was dominated by Iraq, Afghanistan and terrorism,” with the nation pouring $10 billion a month into wars that were creating horrific carnage without advancing American interests. “There are questions of bandwidth,” he said. “If you’re consumed by the Middle East, you can’t fix climate change or engage Asia.”

This is the kind of American non-military leadership that excites Rhodes, and presumably excites Obama—the global climate deal in Paris, the “pivot” to Asia exemplified by the Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade agreement, the coordination of the global fight against the Ebola virus, the opening to Cuba that the Times Magazine profile barely mentioned, even though Rhodes helped negotiate it in secret. Even the Iran deal is more about Obama’s commitment to nuclear non-proliferation than any chessboard vision for defusing tensions in the Middle East. The basic theory is to focus on areas in which progress is possible—peace talks in Colombia, climate talks with China, an opening to Myanmar—rather than the rift between Sunnis and Shiites.

“The president is positioning the U.S. to lead in the places that matter in the 21st century,” Rhodes said. “The idea is to avoid getting sucked into ground wars in the Middle East, engage with emerging regions like Asia and Latin America, and deal with emerging issues like climate and non-proliferation through diplomacy.”

His implication was that the Middle East is not a place that matters in the 21st century, but Rhodes said the White House isn’t abandoning the region, just “trying to cabin our engagement so it doesn’t lead to an overextension.” (That was the first time I ever heard the word “cabin” used as a verb.) Obama has stepped up the use of drone warfare and special operations to target terrorists. He’s bombing ISIL in Syria, and trying to build a coalition to deal with ISIL in Iraq and Libya. The killing of Osama bin Laden, Rhodes noted, served as its own communications strategy.

In general, though, Rhodes and Obama wish the media focused less on the Middle East and the related issue of terrorism. That’s not just because they believe the danger of terrorism is consistently overhyped, although they do believe that. It’s not just because they believe threat inflation helps terrorists spread fear, although they believe that as well. Rhodes worries that the hype cycle ratchets up demand for misguided Iraq War-style responses, and Obama apparently shares that concern.

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Dumb fear-driven discourse creates pressure for dumb fear-driven policies. At a news conference after last year’s terror attacks in Paris, a CNN reporter—considerably older than 27—asked Obama: “Why can’t we take out the bastards?” The president was irritated, since he had just tried to explain his strategy against ISIL, and Rhodes still sounded irritated when I talked to him four months later. He scoffed at the idea of a magical solution that could instantly obliterate ISIL and its sympathizers in Syria, Iraq and Libya, not to mention France and Belgium.

“And what if we did take out the bastards?” he said. “We’d have to occupy the ungoverned space in the Middle East, and there would be an insurgency, and we’d get stuck in a sectarian conflict. But that’s complicated. People just want to take out the bastards. The president’s strength is that he understands the complexity of the world, but it’s hard to compete with ‘we need to make the desert glow’ or ‘we just need more leadership.’ Black and white is easier to convey than nuance.”

The one time Rhodes went off the record during our chat was after he mentioned Obama’s concern that “a cascade of fear-mongering” was debasing America’s foreign policy debate. But he did suggest on the record that the amped-up hysteria of cable news, as well as belligerent chest-thumping and Muslim-bashing by Republican candidates, contributed to a climate inhospitable to rational decisions. “We have to guard against reverting back to the Iraq War mind-set,” he said.

To Rhodes, the ultimate example of America’s debased foreign policy debate was the widespread mockery of Obama’s suggestion that his first principle was “Don’t Do Stupid Shit.” Critics saw that as a pitifully modest aspiration for a superpower, but Rhodes asked: “Why would we want to do stupid shit?” To the White House, of course, the Iraq War, with its immense cost in blood and treasure and America’s standing in the world, is the ultimate example of stupid shit.

One could argue that Rhodes’ decision to cooperate with Samuels, who has publicly called for Israel to attack Iran, was pretty stupid, too, thrusting himself into the unforgiving Washington "echo chamber" for which he harbors such evident disdain.

In the Times Magazine, Samuels carved up Rhodes and his boss, suggesting that they use Iraq as an all-purpose retort to all criticism, that their monomaniacal fear of another Iraq is its own kind of blinkered thinking, that their fatalistic notions about the Middle East have become an excuse for inaction in the face of hundreds of thousands of deaths and a monumental refugee crisis. And Rhodes came off as an arrogant jerk.

As he told me in March, it's easy to lose control of the narrative in Washington.

“It’s so hard to get people to focus on substance,” Rhodes said. “And the optics of this stuff are a real challenge.”